Hey everyone, what's the best card I can get for anywhere from $150-200, in light of Black Friday/Cyber Monday?

This will be going in a machine with an i5-3570K, 8 GB of RAM, and a 128 GB Crucial M4. Will be used to play games like Planetside 2, Battlefield 3, Natural Selection 2, CS:GO, and Blacklight Retribution.

I'm located in the US, so preferred stores include Newegg, TigerDirect, Amazon (not as much since I get charged sales tax now :\), and I don't have any problem with mail-in rebates, so technically my budget max is $220 or so

and for the GPU I would go with the Nvidia GF 650Ti. I got it for 160 at microcenter. Very nice mid-range card for the money. I can max out skyrim at 1080p pretty easy. The GPU peaked at 35-42C on an outside part. It was around 30-40fps outside and 50 inside.... not too bad. I had most settings on ultra with the AA, etc turned up as well.

Would a 650ti be better than a 560ti? That's the card my brother had, until it broke (physically)

I know the 550ti was severely gimped compared to the 560ti

Where the 550Ti was gimped compared to the 560Ti was in two areas - bandwidth and CUDA core/ROP count. Both are areas where even the "gimped" GTX550Ti trumps the non-Ti GTX650.

Think - the GTX550Ti is a cut-down GTX560Ti; naturally it would be gimped compared to the more-expensive relation. (The same is true comparing the GTX650 to the GTX660 - either non-Ti vs. non-Ti OR Ti vs.Ti.)

By rights the GTX550Ti should be compared to the GTX650 non-Ti - they are priced identically pretty much for the same memory loadouts, and have similar power requirements; however, the Fermi part has higher bandwidth than the Kepler part (192-bit memory bus for Fermi vs. 128-bit for Kepler).

Given identical RAM configurations, bandwidth needs of your games should rightly determine which you should buy (especially since, as I pointed out, GTX550Ti is directly price-comparable to GTX650 non-Ti).

The same is, of course, true on the AMD side of GPU Street (HD7770 vs. HD7850 or even HD7850 vs. HD7870) - in the case of the former, the HD7770 has a bandwidth disadvantage compared to HD7850; however, it makes up for it with both lower power requirements and a lower price - the latter two are identical in terms of bandwidth, but dissimilar in terms of power draw and (again) price; still there is a smaller gap there between HD7850 and HD7870 compared to HD7770 vs. HD7850.

HD7770 competes with both the GTX650 non-Ti and GTX550Ti in terms of price and RAM loadout (except that 2GB loadouts of HD7770 are not common among AMD AIBs, while both GTX550Ti and GTX650 non-Ti have a plethora of 2GB iterations from nVidia AIBs) - If you are looking in that $100USD-$200USD (single GPU) price range and don't have loyalty to a particular GPU AIB or even AMD vs. nVidia in general, it can be rather difficult choosing a card.

Normally, I stick with AMD (and ATI before that) - I have NEVER purchased an nVidia GPU for my own use. However, the higher bandwidth of the GTX550Ti - at either the same price, or even a bit cheaper, compared to the HD7770 - has me rethinking that.